John is CEO of Magnatune, the Creative Commons music label. Magnatune launched in 2003 with the idea: “could the same open source principles that helped Linux successfully combat Microsoft be applied to the music industry?” Using a Creative Commons license and applying 9 of the 10 Open-Source-Institute requirements for “open source” (we'll tell you which one we skipped, and why), Magnatune has survived for 5 years. Buckman will talk about what has and more importantly, has not worked, and what the future looks like in a post-DRM music world.

Mike is Vice President of Creative Commons, and is speaking about free culture and how many years it is behind free software. Where is free culture/open content c.2008 in its development relative to free software/open source? 1983, 1989, 1991, 1998, 2004? Do users of culture require the same freedoms?

Stewart works at MySQL, and his talk is called “mysql> SHOW STATUS;”. A whirlwind summary of what's been going on in the MySQL world (along with some tips and tricks thrown in). He''ll talk a bit about the upcoming 5.1 release (what's in it, and why it has taken so long).

In “Reverend Ted's Noon Hour Extravaganza”, or “Freedom and the Cloud: Developer Platforms meet Software as a Service”, Ted from Bungee Labs explains how new wave of software development is taking shape, allowing developers to create and deploy software entirely through the browser. In this talk, Ted Haeger explains platform-as-a-service and some of the issues it raises regarding software freedom. What is the GPL's “SaaS loophole”? How do web service providers promote or discourage the ethics of Free Software? Why does the Affero GPL matter? How does free software enable invigorate startup innovation, and what are the ethical obligations to reciprocate of the companies that use free software to build their business?

Grateful thanks

LRL USA is happening because we're being sponsored by people. We'd like to say a
great big thanks to Google, for all the hard work that Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, and
Kynan are doing to make LRL happen in America!

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We'd also like to say thanks to our other sponsors, Dice.com, who are making it
possible for the LugRadio team to be in the US at all!